“Yes,” he said. “You can always come to me if you are afraid or uncertain about something. And even when you are in the yard, I want you to make sure that you tell Mum where you are, and that you remain near her, within sight of the cottage. Always take someone with you to pick flowers. Can you promise me that also?”

“I promise. But Mum has already told me such.”

“Good,” he said. But within, he told himself, I have to stay here until this mystery of the missing lasses is solved. I have to see this through, even if it takes longer than summer.

“Is that what happened to Eliza and Annabel?” Frae asked with a somber expression. “Did a spirit knock on their windows?”

Jack hesitated. He didn’t want to scare her more than necessary, but he remembered Adaira’s words from the day before. One girl had gone missing on her walk home from school. The other, while tending the sheep in the pasture. He thought back on the stories Mirin had once told him. Legends where spirits—often benevolent ones—thrived in the yard and were even welcomed inside, such as when a fire was lit in the hearth. But he had never heard of one approaching a house and forcibly entering. Not that it was impossible, as the spirits often accepted the gifts left for them on porches and thresholds, but it seemed that even the most dangerous of beings preferred to be in the wild, where their powers were strongest.

“I’m not sure, Frae,” Jack said.

“Mum says the spirits in our yard are good. As long as I am home or stay on the roads or at school, the folk can’t trick me. They watch over me, especially when I wear my plaid.”

Jack’s eyes drifted to Frae’s shawl, which she had knotted crookedly over her collarbones. He noted its shimmer of enchantment. The shawl was green from summer bracken and nettles, with a vein of madder red and lichen gold. Colors of the earth spirits, harvested and crushed and soaked to make dyes. He wondered what secret was woven into that pattern, and for once he was glad of Mirin’s skill.

He smiled at his little sister, hoping to ease her worry. “Mum’s right. Now show me where the best flowers grow.”

Torin was walking the nook of the marsh, searching for the missing girls, when he spotted Jack standing beside a crown of rocks, waiting to speak with him. Torin took his time. His clothes were wrinkled stiff from the rain, and his eyes bleary from a long night, but he continued to comb through the wet grass. His boots squelched, startling meadow pipits in their morning foray as his guards fanned out behind him. Eventually he reached Jack and the shadows of the rocks. Torin noticed a flower was tucked into Jack’s dark hair, but he said nothing of it.